Running Blind Read online

  “You OK?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I guess.”

  “So let’s go.”

  The driver fought traffic twenty blocks uptown and went underground into the same crowded garage Lamarr had brought him to. They used the same elevator in the corner. Rode up to the twenty-first floor. Stepped out into the same quiet gray corridor. The driver preceded them like a host and pointed to his left.

  “Third door,” he said.

  James Cozo was behind his desk and looked as though he might have been there for an hour. He was in shirtsleeves. His jacket was on a hanger on a bentwood hat stand. He was watching television, political cable, an earnest reporter in front of the Capitol, rapid cutaways to the Hoover Building. The budget hearings.

  “The return of the vigilante,” he said.

  He nodded to Harper and closed a file. Muted the television sound and pushed back from his desk and rubbed his hands over his narrow face, like he was washing without water.

  “So what do you want?” he asked.

  “Addresses,” Reacher said. “For Petrosian’s boys.”

  “The two you put in the hospital? They won’t be pleased to see you.”

  “They’ll be pleased to see me leave.”

  “You going to hurt them again?”

  “Probably.”

  Cozo nodded. “Suits me, pal.”

  He pulled a file from a stack and rooted through it. Copied an address onto a slip of paper.

  “They live together,” he said. “They’re brothers.”

  Then he thought again and tore the paper into shreds. Reversed the open file on the desk and took a new sheet of paper. Tossed a pencil on top of it.

  “You copy it,” he said. “Don’t want my handwriting anywhere near this, literally or metaphorically.”

  The address was near Fifth, on Sixty-sixth Street.

  “Nice neighborhood,” Reacher said. “Expensive.”

  Cozo nodded again. “Lucrative operation.”

  Then he smiled.

  “Well, it was,” he said. “Until you got busy down in Chinatown.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “Take a taxi,” Cozo said to Harper. “And you stay out of the way. No overt Bureau involvement here, OK?”

  She nodded, reluctantly.

  “Have fun,” Cozo said.

  THEY WALKED OVER to Madison with Harper craning like a tourist. Caught a cab uptown and got out on the corner of Sixtieth Street.

  “We’ll walk the rest of the way,” Reacher said.

  “We?” Harper said. “Good. I want to stay involved.”

  “You have to stay involved,” Reacher said. “Because I won’t get in without you.”

  The address led them six blocks north to a plain, medium-height apartment building faced with gray brick. Metal window frames, no balconies. Air conditioners built through the walls under the windows. No awning over the sidewalk, no doorman. But it was clean and well kept.

  “Expensive place?” Harper asked.

  Reacher shrugged. “I don’t know. Not the most expensive, I guess. But they won’t be giving them away.”

  The street door was open. The lobby was narrow, with hard stucco walls carefully streaked with paint so they looked a little like marble. There was a single elevator at the back of the lobby, with a narrow brown door.

  The apartment they wanted was on the eighth floor. Reacher touched the elevator button and the door rolled back. The car was lined with bronze mirror on all four sides. Harper stepped in and Reacher crowded after her. Pressed 8. An infinite number of reflections rode up with them.

  “You knock on their door,” Reacher said. “Get them to open up. They won’t if they see me in the spyhole.”

  She nodded and the elevator stopped on 8. The door rolled back. They stepped out on a dull landing the same shape as the lobby. The apartment they were looking for was in the back of the building on the right.

  Reacher stood flat against the wall and Harper stood in front of the door. She bent forward and then back to flip her hair off her face. Took a breath and raised her hand and knocked on the door. Nothing happened for a moment. Then Harper stiffened like she was under scrutiny. There was a rattle of chain from the inside and the door opened a crack.

  “Building management,” Harper said. “I need to check the air conditioners.”

  Wrong season, Reacher thought. But Harper was more than six feet tall and had blond hair more than a yard long and her hands in her pockets so the front of her shirt was pulled tight. The door pushed shut for a second and the chain rattled again and the door swung back. Harper stepped inside like she was accepting a gracious invitation.

  Reacher peeled off the wall and followed her in before the door closed again. It was a small dark apartment with a view of the light well. Everything was brown, rugs, furniture, drapes. There was a small foyer opening to a small living room. The living room held a sofa and two armchairs, and Harper. And both of the guys Reacher had last seen leaving the alley behind Mostro’s.

  “Hey, guys,” he said.

  “We’re brothers,” the first guy said, irrelevantly.

  They both had broad strips of hospital gauze taped to their foreheads, stark white, a little longer and broader than the labels Reacher had stuck there. One of them had bandages on his hands. They were dressed identically in sweaters and golf pants. Without their bulky overcoats, they looked smaller. One guy was wearing boat shoes. The other was wearing moccasin slippers that looked like he’d made them himself from a mail-order kit. Reacher stared at them and felt his aggression drain away.

  “Shit,” he said.

  They stared back at him.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  They sat, side by side on the sofa. They watched him, with fearful eyes hooded under the ludicrous gauze.

  “Are these the right guys?” Harper asked.

  Reacher nodded.

  “Things change, I guess,” he said.

  “Petrosian’s dead,” the first guy said.

  “We know that already,” Reacher said back.

  “We don’t know nothing else,” the second guy said.

  Reacher shook his head. “Don’t say that. You know plenty of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like where Bellevue is.”

  The first guy looked nervous. “Bellevue?”

  Reacher nodded. “The hospital they took you to.”

  Both brothers looked at the wall.

  “You liked it there?” Reacher asked.

  Neither one of them replied.

  “You want to go back there?”

  No reply.

  “Big emergency room there, right?” Reacher said. “Good for fixing all kinds of things. Broken arms, broken legs, all kinds of injuries.”

  The brother with the bandaged hands was older. The spokesman.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “A trade.”

  “What for what?”

  “Information,” Reacher said. “In exchange for not sending you back to Bellevue.”

  “OK,” the guy said.

  Harper smiled. “That was easy.”

  “Easier than I thought it would be,” Reacher said.

  “Things change,” the guy said. “Petrosian’s dead.”

  “Those guns you had,” Reacher said. “Where did you get them?”

  The guy was wary.

  “The guns?” he said.

  “The guns,” Reacher repeated. “Where did you get them?”

  “Petrosian gave them to us,” the guy said.

  “Where did he get them from?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Reacher smiled and shook his head. “You can’t say that. You can’t just say we don’t know. It’s not convincing. You could say I don’t know, but you can’t answer for your brother. You can’t know for sure what he knows, can you?”

  “We don’t know,” the guy said again.

  “They came from the Army,” Reacher said.r />
  “Petrosian bought them,” the guy said.

  “He paid for them,” Reacher said.

  “He bought them.”

  “He arranged their purchase, I accept that.”

  “He gave them to us,” the younger brother said.

  “Did they come in the mail?”

  The older brother nodded. “Yes, in the mail.”

  Reacher shook his head. “No, they didn’t. He sent you to pick them up someplace. Probably a whole consignment. ”

  “He picked them up himself.”

  “No, he didn’t. He sent you. Petrosian wouldn’t go himself. He sent you, in that Mercedes you were using. ”

  The brothers stared at the wall, thinking, like there was a decision to be made.

  “Who are you?” the older one asked.

  “I’m nobody,” Reacher said.

  “Nobody?”

  “Not a cop, not FBI, not ATF, not anybody.”

  No reply.

  “So there’s an upside and a downside here,” Reacher said. “You tell me stuff, it stays with me. Doesn’t have to go any farther. I’m interested in the Army, not you. The downside is, you don’t tell me, I’m not concerned with sending you off to court with all kinds of civil rights. I’m concerned with sending you back to Bellevue with all kinds of broken arms and legs.”

  “You INS?” the guy asked.

  Reacher smiled. “Mislaid your green cards?”

  The brothers said nothing.

  “I’m not INS,” Reacher said. “I told you, I’m not anything. I’m nobody. Just a guy who wants an answer. You tell me the answer, you can stay here as long as you want, enjoy the benefits of American civilization. But I’m getting impatient. Those shoes aren’t going to do it forever.”

  “Shoes?”

  “I don’t want to hit a guy wearing slippers like that.”

  There was silence.

  “New Jersey,” the older brother said. “Through the Lincoln Tunnel, there’s a roadhouse set back where Route 3 meets the turnpike.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “I don’t know,” the guy said. “Somebody’s Bar, is all I know. Mac something, like Irish.”

  “Who did you see in there?”

  “Guy called Bob.”

  “Bob what?”

  “Bob, I don’t know. We didn’t exchange business cards or anything. Petrosian just told us Bob.”

  “A soldier?”

  “I guess. I mean, he wasn’t in uniform or nothing. But he had real short hair.”

  “How does it go down?”

  “You go in the bar, you find him, you give him the cash, he takes you in the parking lot and gives you the stuff out of the trunk of his car.”

  "A Cadillac,” the other guy said. "An old DeVille, some dark color.”

  “How many times?”

  “Three.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Berettas. Twelve each trip.”

  “What time of day?”

  “Evening time, around eight o’clock.”

  “You have to call him ahead?”

  The younger brother shook his head.

  “He’s always in there by eight o’clock,” he said. “That’s what Petrosian told us.”

  Reacher nodded.

  “So what does Bob look like?” he asked.

  “Like you,” the older brother said. “Big and mean.”

  23

  THE LAW PROVIDES that a narcotics conviction can be accompanied by confiscation of assets, which means that the DEA in New York City ends up with more automobiles than it can possibly ever need, so it loans out the surplus to other law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. The FBI uses those vehicles when it needs some anonymous transport that doesn’t look like government-issue. Or when it needs to preserve some respectable distance between itself and some unspecified activity taking place. Therefore James Cozo withdrew the Bureau’s sedan and the services of its driver and tossed Harper the keys to a black one-year-old Nissan Maxima currently parked in the back row of the underground lot.

  “Have fun,” he said again.

  Harper drove. It was the first time she had driven in New York City, and she was nervous about it. She threaded around a couple of blocks and headed south on Fifth and motored slowly, with the taxis plunging and darting and honking around her.

  “OK, what now?” she said.

  Now we waste some time, Reacher thought.

  “Bob’s not around until eight,” he said. “We’ve got the whole afternoon to kill.”

  “I feel like we should be doing something.”

  “No rush,” Reacher said. “We’ve got three weeks.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “First we eat,” Reacher said. “I missed breakfast.”

  YOU’RE HAPPY TO miss breakfast because you need to be sure. The way you predict it, it’s going to be a straight twelve-hour/twelve-hour split between the local police department and the Bureau, with changeovers at eight in the evening and eight in the morning. You saw it happen at eight in the evening yesterday, so now you’re back bright and early to see it happen again at eight this morning. Missing a crummy help-yourself-in-the-lobby motel breakfast is a small price to pay for that kind of certainty. So is the long, long drive into position. You’re not dumb enough to rent a room anywhere close by.

  And you’re not dumb enough to take a direct route, either. You wind your way through the mountains and leave your car on a gravel turnout a half-mile from your spot. The car is safe enough there. The only reason they built the turnout in the first place is that ass-holes are always leaving their cars there while they go watching eagles or scrambling over rocks or hiking up and down. A rental car parked neatly on the gravel is as invisible as the ski bags on the airport carousel. Just part of the scenery.

  You climb away from the road up a small hill maybe a hundred feet high. There are scrawny trees all over the place, a little more than shoulder high. They have no leaves, but the terrain keeps you concealed. You’re in a kind of wide trench. You step left and right to pass tumbled boulders. At the top of the hill you follow the ridge to the left. You duck low as the ground starts to fall away on the other side. You drop to your knees and shuffle forward to where two giant rocks rest on each other, giving a wonderful random view of the valley through the triangle they make between them. You lean your right shoulder on the right-hand rock and Lieutenant Rita Scimeca’s house slides into the exact center of your field of view, just a little more than two hundred yards away.

  The house is slightly north and west of your position, so you’re getting a full-frontal of the street side. It’s maybe three hundred feet down the mountain, so the whole thing is laid out like a plan. The Bureau car is right there, parked outside. A clean Buick, dark blue. One agent in it. You use your field glasses. The guy is still awake. His head is upright. He’s not looking around much. Just staring forward, bored out of his skull. You can’t blame him. Twelve hours through the night, in a place where the last big excitement was somebody’s Christmas bake sale.

  It’s cold in the hills. The rock is sucking heat out of your shoulder. There’s no sun. Just sullen clouds stacked up over the giant peaks. You turn away for a moment and pull on your gloves. Pull your muffler up over the lower half of your face. Partly for the warmth, partly to break up the clouds of steam your breathing is creating in the air. You turn back. Move your feet and squirm around. Get comfortable. You raise the glasses again.

  The house has a wire fence all the way around the perimeter of the yard. There’s an opening onto a driveway. The driveway is short. A single garage door stands at the end of it, under the end of the front porch. There’s a path off the driveway that loops around through some neat rockery planting to the front door. The Bureau car is parked at the sidewalk right across the driveway opening, just slightly up the hill from dead center. Facing down the rise. That puts the driver’s line of vision directly in line with the mouth of the path. Intelligent positioning. If you wal
k up the hill to the house, he sees you coming all the way. You come on him from behind, he maybe spots you in his mirror, and he sees you for certain as soon as you pass him by. Then he gets a clear back view all the way as you walk up the looping path. Intelligent positioning, but that’s the Bureau for you.

  You see movement a half-mile to the west and two hundred feet farther down the mountain. A black-and-white Crown Victoria, nosing through a right-angle turn. Prowling, slow. It snuffles through the turns and enters her road. A cloud of white vapor trails from the tailpipe. The engine is cold. The car has been parked up all night behind a quiet station house. It comes up the street and slows and stops flank to flank with the Buick. The cars are a foot apart. You don’t see it for sure but you know the windows are buzzing down. Greetings are being exchanged. Information is being passed on. It’s all quiet, the Bureau guy is saying. Have a nice day, he’s adding. The local cop is grunting. Pretending to be bored, while secretly he’s thrilled to have an important mission. Maybe the first he’s ever had. See you later, the Bureau guy is saying.

  The black-and-white moves up the hill and turns in the road. The Buick’s engine starts and the car lurches as the agent slams it into drive. The black-and-white noses in behind it. The Buick moves away down the hill. The black-and-white rolls forward and stops. Exactly where the Buick was, inch for inch. It bounces twice on its springs and settles. The motor stops. The white vapor drifts and disappears. The cop turns his head to the right and gets exactly the same view of the path the Bureau guy had gotten. Maybe not such a dumb-ass, after all.

  HARPER DROVE THE Maxima into a commercial parking garage on West Ninth Street, right after Reacher told her the grid pattern was about to finish and the street layout was about to get messy. They walked back east and south and found a bistro with a view of Washington Square Park. The waitress had a copy of a digest-sized philosophy journal to lean her order pad on. A student from NYU, making ends meet. The air was cold, but the sun was out. The sky was blue.

  “I like it here,” Harper said. “Great city.”

  “I told Jodie I’m selling the house,” Reacher said.

  She looked across at him. “She OK with that?”

  He shrugged. “She’s worried. I don’t see why. It makes me a happier person, how can that worry her?”